dialect in novels

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Tuesday, February 27, 2001 12:20 pm -0500 Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM
wrote:

> Natalie Maynor <maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU> writes:
>
>>>>>>
> On the question of "got," is our US use of "gotten" on the decline?
> I was talking about it in a class recently, mentioning that "gotten"
> vanished from British English a long time ago (but "forgotten" is still
> used, isn't it?).

The other day, I had cause to ask someone about 'forgotten' in British
English.  Yes, that's still the form--and the lack of parallelism between
"I have got used to it" and "I have forgotten your name" doesn't seem to
get any notice.

British English also tends to use 'get' less often than American English in
my experience...

Lynne




M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
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